7 Books That Made Me an Entrepreneur!

in this video i'm going to share with you seven books that changed my life as an entrepreneur you've probably heard of at least one or two of these books but i guarantee you there's at least one if not two books on this list that you haven't heard of before what's up everyone paul here from dropshippingtitans. com normally on this channel i talk a lot about how to make money online and we really get into the weeds here get into the nitty-gritty and the how-to but in this video i want to take more of a bird's-eye approach and really look at how to be an entrepreneur so i'm going to share with you seven books that kind of shaped who i am as a person and as an entrepreneur because i think the two are really related and these are books that i recommend that really anyone read if you want to be successful in life when it comes to entrepreneurship or being smart with your money or just being a good person which does affect you as an entrepreneur so one of the earliest books that i read

that had a hugely profound impact on my life was the four hour work week by tim ferriss i actually read this book in college or right after college and i remember reading it and thinking to myself wow well wouldn't that be nice wouldn't it be nice to be in the same position as tim ferriss and only have to work four hours a week i read what he had to say in there and just kind of thought well that's nice but i'm just never going to achieve that little did i know everything i read in that book kind of set the seeds and those seeds slowly grew and blossomed over time and i never forgot what he taught in that book and ultimately i have been able to achieve everything he talks about in this book which is just crazy to think about looking back so the primary idea in this book is actually a pretty simple one why delay your life until retirement so he really questioned the norm of working for 40 years or more just to be able to retire and then enjoy your life after that he said why delay that why not start enjoying your life now why not build a business for yourself that works on your schedule so that you can have these periods of mini retirements or just be working only a few hours a week and having your business passively make you money you see what tim ferriss realized is that you don't have to be a millionaire in order to live like a millionaire so how he does this is he separates his time from his money so he doesn't have to work and put in time in order to get money out of the businesses that is already built and a big component of this is by outsourcing to virtual assistants in other countries where the cost of living is less so you don't have to pay them as much as you would an employee in the united states they can work for you for just a few dollars an hour and run your business and you can make money very passively and that's a lesson that i never forgot so when i started drop shipping i started hiring these virtual assistants and i had them do exactly that i had them run my stores where i now have multiple different online businesses and a lot of them are automated very much so thanks to software and virtual assistants so i don't have to spend as much time running them as i would with a traditional business and there are a lot of other principles in this book that just really stuck with me that i never forgot and they were my first introduction to these ideas like the 80 20 principle of elimination which basically says hey you know about 80 of the things that you do don't matter it's really only the 20 of things that really move the needle forward that really make the biggest difference so you should be focusing just on that 20 so you don't waste your time on the other eighty percent and he goes much more into this 80 20 principle so it's really worth reading it just for ideas like that he also talked about low information diets which is basically where you don't spend so much time reading the news or consuming or scrolling through your facebook feed just to gather more information he says hey if you want to be really successful at something just focus on that one thing and kind of put on the blinders don't worry about other things in your life don't worry about all these outside distractions that are really just designed to distract you kind of incorporate one of these low information diets where you only receive the information that you really need and the other thing that he really was big on was setting boundaries and being able to say no to people and as an entrepreneur that is such an important skill to learn because as an entrepreneur you're going to discover that there's not a lack of amazing opportunities there are a ton of amazing opportunities but you can't say yes to all of them and the more that you say no to opportunities can focus on single opportunities that really push the needle forward and really help you achieve the life that you want now there's a lot more to this book so i do highly recommend it i will say i did not take action on this book right away and the ideas in it took me a long time but ultimately i did achieve what he talks about in this book to some degree and i really think it set the kind of framework for my entire life as an entrepreneur so this is one book i highly recommend now all the books i mentioned in this video i will have my amazon affiliate links to them down below doesn't cost you guys any extra to use those links but they are there if you want to support the channel

the second book that had a huge impact on me as an entrepreneur is rich dad poor dad by robert kiyosaki now this book was so important to me because it really kind of taught me how important and how amazing it is to start your own business so a little bit of tough love here because what he teaches is that the fastest way to become rich is to own your own business and in fact he really argues it's the only way to become rich according to the author most people spend their entire life making someone else rich so he argues that if you are working for someone else all you are doing is working to make them rich i think he tells a kind of parable in the story that in the book that's really funny or you might have i might have gotten this from somewhere else but the parable basically says you know an employee goes into work one day and his boss comes in with a really nice looking sports car and the employee says wow that is an amazing car and the employer says yeah and one day if you keep working as hard as you are right now i'll be able to buy another one so you kind of get the idea there right if you're an employee all you're doing is helping someone else become rich but most people stay in that position as an employee out of fear the fear of starting their own business and the risk that's involved with that but you shouldn't really be afraid of starting your own business because there are so many advantages to doing so and people actually want you and the government actually wants you to start your own business that's why there's so many tax advantages to owning your own business so what i've learned from this book is that the traditional employee what happens is they earn money by working then the government takes out a portion of that for taxes and what's ever left over that is your paycheck and that is what you get to spend but if you're a business owner it works differently because you earn money then you get to spend it and then whatever's left over that is what gets taxed because as a business owner you get tax deductions you are allowed to make business purchases which then offsets the income that you make and you're just not able to do that as an employee and there are a lot of other tax advantages to owning your own business as well and he just says that's the fastest way to become rich so reading this book really helped me understand just how amazing it is to own your own business and the importance of doing it and how if you really want to build some wealth it's really the smartest way to do so now robert kiyosaki talks about a lot more in this book things like the difference between an asset and a liability he talks about how rich people don't just let their money sit they actually invest it but really it was the part about entrepreneurship that really sunk in for me and it really got me thinking yeah i think i need to start my own business so this one definitely had a huge impact on my life when it came to the kind of impetus or the push to start my own business now once i actually

started to see success as an entrepreneur and actually quit my day job in order to do my side hustle full-time one of the struggles i had was that i wasn't quite sure how to structure my day my week my month or my year and i really struggled with goal setting and staying on target with those things and that's when i discovered this book called the 12 week year by brian p moran and michael lennington this book really kind of shook things up for me when it came to goal setting and planning because traditionally at the end of the year plan out my entire next year the full 12 months but what the authors of this book are pushing people to do is instead of having a 12 month year have instead a 12 week year should plan things out for the next 12 weeks and only why is that well as we know from setting goals for new year's resolutions they don't usually get done why is that well new year's resolutions and when you give yourself so much time to accomplish a goal like an entire year very often what happens is that either one you wait to the last minute or two you think you have so much time that you kind of forget about it and then you forget about it entirely so as an example if you in school i'm sure either you've done this yourself or you've seen a lot of other students do this where an essay is assigned you have weeks to do it then everyone's doing it the night before that's just the reality of how it is and the same is true if you set a goal a business goal for the entire year most people just kind of say well i have an entire year to do it so i'm not going to spend really a lot of energy doing it until the last minute but if you set those just 12 weeks to accomplish that goal then there's a hustle right you only have 12 weeks so you really got to start moving right away and start making progress right away the other problem with planning out an entire 12 months is that usually you have too many goals that you're trying to accomplish a whole 12 months sounds like a lot of time so you think you're going to be able to accomplish a lot so you set a lot of goals for yourself and very often that just leads to confusion well which goal should i work on which one is the real priority and things kind of get lost in terms of figuring out which one is the priority if you have a 12-week year what the authors want you to do is they want you to pick really just one main goal or as few as possible but really ideally just one main goal that you are going to be focusing on very intently for the next 12 weeks and if you focus on that really helps you really lock down the most important thing that you have to do and for me personally since i started doing this i've really seen a renewed focus and clarity around what it is i'm trying to accomplish and have gotten a lot more done using the 12 week year system as opposed to doing the 12 month year system the other thing i really loved about this book is that it goes into a lot more than what i talked about in this video and it really goes into mindset and motivation and explained it in a way that really resonated with me no other book really has so i highly recommend this book to everyone i think everyone can gain a lot of motivation and a lot of insights from this book the 12-week year all

right the fourth book i want to talk about is called money master the game seven simple steps to financial freedom by tony robbins now i know a lot of you let me just back up a second i know a lot of you might think oh tony robbins you know the kind of that woo-woo motivation guy and i gotta say this book is really concrete real advice that tony robbins got from financial experts and it really goes over how you should be investing your money what you should be doing with your money in order to set yourself up to master it and really be successful with money and really the overarching theme of the book is that you need to make your money work for you so the first concept from this book that really blew my mind that i had never heard about before and that someone quite honestly should have taught me about before i read this book was the idea of compound interest now what compound interest the idea is basically if you invest just a little bit now it could be worth a whole lot in the future because of this idea of compound interest the best way to explain it is basically just to show you how it works with this calculator so let's say you invest today one thousand dollars into the stock market okay and let's say every single month after that you contribute 200 and you're going to do that for 40 years at an estimated interest rate of 8 i'm not going to get into why that is but that's just about the average and that compounds annually you'll see that after 40 years you will have 643 thousand dollars why is that because the first year you have the thousand dollars and at the end of that year that thousand dollars then uh gains money because of the interest rate of eight percent then that total will then have an increase of eight percent and then it keeps just increasing from there and that's the power of compound interest even if we took away the two hundred dollars here every single month let's say you invested one thousand dollars right now and you didn't contribute any more money for the next 40 years at the end of 40 years that would be worth 21 000 so you see how investing a little bit early on as early as possible can really help you make a lot of money in the long term because let's say we change this length at just 20 years let's say you don't start investing until you're in your 50s then that one thousand dollars will only be worth four thousand dollars after 20 years that is the way compound interest works it's not half of what 40 years is because of the way compound interest works so it is a little bit confusing but just know that the more you invest early on the more you can make in the long run due to this incredible thing called compound interest what this also means is that even little decisions little purchases can really add up over the long term so they introduced this idea called the latte factor which basically says hey if you bought one latte every single day if instead of buying that you invested that money how much would that money be worth after 30 40 years so we have this cool calculator here i found online so let's say every day you spend five dollars on a cup of coffee every single day and again we do the eight percent return and let's say you do that for the next 30 years well if instead of spending five dollars a day on a cup of coffee if you invested that money then after 30 years that would be worth 54 000 that's how much you spent but because of compound interest if you invested that it would actually be worth 226 thousand five hundred and thirty four dollars so when i learned this it absolutely blew my mind no one had ever taught this to me before and it really kind of set things up for the next thing that tony robbins talked about in the book which were index funds because obviously at this point i'm thinking okay i have to invest in the stock market but what he argues is that instead of investing in the stock market directly into individual stocks you should be investing in these things called index funds so an index fund is a collection of stocks so instead of investing in an individual stock like you might buy tesla stock you are buying into a fund that's comprised of many different stocks within a similar index so if you bought like tesla if it goes up a lot you stand to make a lot of money but if it goes down you stand to lose a lot of money it's basically putting all your eggs in one basket but with an index fund one of the benefits of it is that there's a lot more diversification because you're not putting all your money into one stock but rather into a broad spectrum of stocks so for instance one of my favorite index funds is through a company called vanguard and they have the vanguard 500 index fund admiral shares which is basically made up of the 500 largest companies in the us which is basically the s p 500 so by investing in the vanguard 500 fund i'm investing in all of the top 500 us companies all the companies that make up the s p 500 which includes tesla so if tesla goes down that's going to be okay because the other 499 companies will hopefully also be going up so that overall this does go up over time and we're not just going up and down according to the whims of one single stock another index fund that i absolutely love is called the vanguard total stock market index fund admiral shares which basically tracks the entire u. s equity market now the other benefits of index funds besides the broad diversification are the lower taxes normally when you are trading stocks or different funds like that there's a lot of trading going on and anytime trading happens it costs you money but with the index funds it's more of a buy and hold strategy so you're not going to be taxed as often but the thing that i really love about index funds and what really blew my mind about them are the lower fees involved with investing in them so with something like the vanguard 500 or the total stock market index fund the expense ratio is only 0. 04 percent and that is extremely low a lot of times when you start investing with a financial advisor or some mutual funds you're gonna see that your expense ratio after all the fees and kind of the hidden fees can be as high as one percent now one percent doesn't sound like a lot but as this book taught me it really adds up a lot and when i learned this is another one of those things that this book just completely blew my mind on so check out this calculator i found let's say you invest with a company that has an expense ratio of basically one percent after all the fees now let's compare that to the vanguard total stock market index fund which has an expense ratio of 0. 04 so i plug that into investment number two here let's say you have an additional investment of ten thousand dollars and you add five thousand dollars in every year with an investment return of eight percent over the course of thirty years how much more expensive do you think investment one will be over investment two because this blew my mind it's a difference of a hundred and thirteen thousand dollars and the crazy thing is that you might be thinking well that's fine because i'm investing with a professional who really knows how to beat the market but another thing that i learned from this book is that those financial experts overall do not beat the market you are better off investing in things like the total stock market index fund or the s p 500 fund and you factor in on top of that the enormous expense ratios and the index funds are really are the winner so this is the book that i read before i started to actually make money online and i'm really glad that i did because i was able to set up these accounts learn this information obtain this financial literacy and then have everything set up for when i did start making money online i was just able to take that money funnel into this system and now i have that money working for me so i cannot recommend this book enough

now the next book i want to talk about is called deep work by cal newport deep work is the concept that you should be doing work with extreme concentration and really just concentrate on one really important task and if you're able to do that it's kind of like a superpower because in this society with where there are so many distractions and so many people who aren't able to concentrate on their work if you are able to do that you will accomplish more and accomplish more deep work than other people and that is like a superpower so on the one hand this book is kind of about how to accomplish this deep work how to really set yourself up to be able to concentrate deeply without those distractions and the power of doing that but almost more importantly it's also an emphasis on why you should be minimizing the number of tasks that you do the number of projects that you do and really just concentrating on one important thing at a time so that is what really benefited me about this book because before this i was kind of scattered kind of thinking about doing too many things at once kind of putting too much importance and priority on different tasks instead of really focusing on the one or two things that again would really move my business forward really move that needle forward so once i was able to really weed through all that eliminate the things that didn't matter outsource the things that could be outsourced and really concentrate on the one or two things that i could do for the business that would make the biggest impact i started seeing exponential growth with my business combine that with now the ability to just sit down and focus intently on the work and accomplish this deep work i really just saw my business grow by leaps and bounds so this kind of reminds me of tim ferriss's book when he talks about the 80 20 principle and the benefits of really focusing down on the 20 of your business that really matters but it wasn't until i kind of read cal newport's book and kind of understood his concept and the way he explained it that it really sunk in for me because i read this book after i had quit my job to do my side hustles full time and when that happened i still had this nine to five mentality mentality that i should work from nine to five and even if i didn't have work to do or didn't really know what to do um as long as i was busy i was getting work done and when i read this book it kind of shook things up for me and said hey you know just being busy that's not enough that's not what you want to be especially as an entrepreneur concentrating on the things that actually matter so quitting my job and reading this book really helped me focus down and become a better entrepreneur but actually the first time i really achieved this state of deep work was when i was in law school which is way before i started

being an entrepreneur at that time when i started law school i knew it would require an immense amount of concentration and work so i basically eliminated all distractions from my life and for three years lived pretty much like a monk the only thing that i did was study i didn't go out and socialize barely had any sort of personal life everything was about studying and getting good grades so that i could do well in law school and then get a good job after that and you know what it worked i did really well in law school because of that i don't think it was really sustainable to do that for a long term so this cookbook kind of taught me how to incorporate those sessions of deep work into a more regular life now before we move on to the next book if you are enjoying this video i would appreciate if you give the video a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel if you want to see more videos in the future about entrepreneurship and making money online and i also want to give you a bonus book right now that i really liked i read earlier this year by the same author cal newport this one is called digital minimalism and it's all about how these digital distractions are really impacting our life in a negative way because we are being sucked into our screens our computers our phones without really intentionality behind it so he does talk a little bit in the book about how to do a digital detox but that's not really the point of the book is about how you can incorporate technology into your life in a purposeful intentional and mindful way so it's not about limiting it entirely it's about how it can work for you without letting it control your life really great book and i really recommend it the next book i want to talk about is called atomic habits by james clear the author of this

book argues that in order to be successful you're not going to have these huge life-changing transformative events instead success happens through the small daily habits that compound over time the problem is that most people try to do too much too fast they think that they can change faster than they really can when in reality what you need to do is put in the work every single day a little bit at a time even when you don't see the results that you want yet and that's really the key point because most people will give up way too early when they don't see that the results as fast as they want them to come but these things compound just like we talked before about compound interest with money it's the same thing with habits and the results of those habits and the success that you get with them so the author the rest of the book is kind of spent teaching you how to form habits the correct way to do it i'm not going to get too much into that in this video but if you are interested in forming bad habits becoming more successful and becoming a better person then i cannot recommend atomic habits enough the last book i want to talk

about today is called anger by tiknot han is a vietnamese monk who's been exiled living in france for the past 30 or 40 years and he writes a lot about buddhism but from a very western approach a very way that's accessible for westerners now i read this book shortly after college and the book is primarily talking about how a lot of us in our society have a lot of anger in us so it's not a book like for anger management so to speak but it does teach you how to deal with these really strong emotions that come up in you now this might be a surprising book to have on this list but this book had a profound huge impact on my life when i read it i don't consider myself a very angry person but what it did was it really introduced me to tiknot han's philosophy his teachings of buddhism and there's a lot in here about meditation and mostly mindfulness more than anything else and it really reading this book and doing some self-discovery i did realize that there was a lot of suffering inside of me a lot of past things that i never really worked through nothing too major to be fully transparent and honest about that the things that were definitely holding me back as a person that i think ultimately if i hadn't worked on they would have held me back as an entrepreneur as well i think that any book by him is an excellent book and this is just the one the first one that i read and it completely transformed my life so if you're interested in becoming a better person which i think being an entrepreneur is an extension of who you are as a person so if you're not a good person you're not going to be a good entrepreneur so if you want to become a better person i cannot recommend his books enough again this is the one that the first one i read that had a huge impact on my life but i'll leave another one down below that's really popular of his that tends to be a lot more popular than this one so there you go those are the top books that i've read throughout my life that have completely changed my life obviously i read a lot more of them and i know you've as well so let me know in the comment section down below the top books that or maybe one or two books that changed your life i would love to hear about them and add them to my own reading list and i think looking at the full list there are certain themes that re-emerge time after time with several of these books so the first is financial freedom that has always been something that has been really important to me and that's reflected in a lot of these books that i read either teaching me about it or teaching me how to do it the other thing that a lot of these books keep bringing up over and over again is entrepreneurship and outsourcing and investing and using all of that to achieve the financial freedom and then the other thing that i noticed is that i really like reading books about systems for outsourcing systems for optimizing my life whether that's the 12-week year or forming habits or something like digital minimalism all these things kind of work together to help me accomplish my goals and i think the last thing i want to say is that the most profound thing i read from all these books is just the ability to focus on what really matters because when i'm able to cut out the distractions be able to really focus down on the one or two really important things that is when i see the most exponential growth with myself and as my business so i hope you guys enjoy this list of books again let me know in the comment section some books that changed your life if you enjoyed the video make sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel then check out this video right here and i'll see you there in just a few seconds